Graffiti artist destroys own work after his art was removed from original locations

Street artist known as “Blu” was protesting against a street art exhibit
backed by banks after the discovery that his work had been removed from some
locations

The street artist #Blu erases all the murals that he painted in Bologna in more than twenty years of activityPhoto: Corbis

By Andrea Vogt, Bologna

8:20PM GMT 13 Mar 2016

One of the world’s most famous graffiti artists has destroyed his own works in the Italian city where he is based to protest against a museum exhibit of street art backed by banks and wealthy patrons.

Aided by a group of activists from the city’s occupied spaces and social centres, the street artist known as “Blu” covered nearly all his remaining works in Bologna with grey paint on Saturday.

He destroyed his own work after discovering some had been removed from their original street locations by technicians in order to be exhibited in the show Street Art: Banksy & Co, which opens on Thursday in Bologna featuring 250 street art works.

Blu started out spraying illegal graffiti in Bologna in the 1990s, but became famous after he began using a roller mounted on a telescopic stick to make large-scale images of monster-like figures.

Blu erases a mural that he painted Photo: Corbis

Invited to decorate the Tate Modern and recognised as one of the world’s top street artists, his paintings can be found across the globe, from the depiction of Christ emerging from piles of guns in Rio de Janeiro, to the Pope preaching from a megaphone in Krakow.

Without consent from all the artists, the exhibition “legitimises the hoarding of art taken off the street”, said Blu’s backers, and creates an avenue for commercialising it via unscrupulous collectors.

In 2014, he took similar action in Berlin, allowing two famous murals in Kreuzberg to be covered in black paint to protest urban development policies.

“We are faced with arrogant landlords who act as colonial governors and think they’re free to take murals off our walls,” the artist said in a statement taped up at the locations of his painted over murals and posted online by Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of Leftist Bologna writers.

“The only thing left to do is making these paintings disappear, to snatch them from those claws, to make hoarding impossible.”

For years the city has been squabbling about whether its unique graffiti should be celebrated as “urban decorum” or criminalised like it was last month when another globally-recognised street artist, Alice Pasquini, was fined €800 (£620) for a graffiti-related offence.